Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why doesn't advice work?

dynomight.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 334 posts

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#201

Post by liotier »

slim wrote: post #198
efitz wrote: post #183

Hard lessons I've learned: 1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome. 2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a se…

[flagged]

Or a smart overwhelmed person who comes home tired and would love not to have to consider extra problems on top of family life and their demanding job. Plenty smart in a domain and just doesn't want to think in another is a common pattern.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#202

Post by jascination »

Swizec wrote: post #200
slim wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> implying your spouse is not a smart person My spouse is a smart person. But she cares about computers about as much as I care about how billion dollar corporate partnerships are made. She just wants her computer to work and I just want my credit card to get discounts.

Nice try, _dummy_!

/s

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#203

Post by nuancebydefault »

asdfman123 wrote: post #175
ryanmcbride wrote: post #98

The rules I have for myself when giving advice are: 1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism. 2. LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY. 3. Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you would do in that situation. 4. Remember that the purpose of giving advice is just to illuminate options, not to have someone follow what you recommend to the letter. 5. As the advice giver understand that you could b…

The most common problem with advice is that people give it before what they understand the real problem. If someone tells you their car is broken, it's not helpful to tell them that they should get it fixed, because maybe the REAL problem is they don't have the money for it and are ashamed to tell you. (And maybe the solution to that is more complicated than you think, too.) For advice to be remotely useful, you have…

This reminds me of my inlaws telling me their car's engine needed finetuning but they did not have the money to spend at it. After a month or so the car's engine broke down 'suddenly' in a total loss fashion. Somehow they managed to buy another car.

I never understood the ways of their prioritization schemes and probably never will. PS of course I gave them the obvious advice. It feels that even though they never buy new cars like I do, they still manage to spend more money on cars then I do.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#204

Post by BiteCode_dev »

I have a joke with my brother:

    How do you win a race against Usain Bolt?

    Just run faster than him!
Every time one gives the other a technically correct but perfectly inapplicable advice, we just answer "yeah, run faster". It's our own private joke of a shortcut keeping our BS in check.

The thing is, when you are giving advice, you are usually missing a lot of context. Context you may not know exists, and that the other person won't or can't share with you. Maybe the other person doesn't even realize this context is needed or is aware of it.

But if you had this context, you would understand how unpractical your advice is to this particular situation, because it's too generic. Too theoretical.

After all, most smokers know they should quit, most fat people know they should lose weight. If it was just about hearing the right path, we would have little problems we can't solve.

But knowing where you should go tells you less than expected about the path ahead because of the aforementioned missing context, such as where you start from and the obstacles in your way, whether you'll be alone on the road or with friends or wild animals, if you have to carry a big bag, if you need to forage for food and if it rains.

That doesn't make advice useless.

But you should not expect to see the effect right now. Rather, they may contribute to a self-realization that the person has to build for themself, adapted to themself. It takes time, it's hard, and there are a lot of other things that fight for being a priority.

Assuming it was good advice to begin with of course, and there are not that many good advice to go around.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#205

Post by digging »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #149
throwawayq3423 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you would do in that situation. This is great. It's empathetic and much more likely to be heard and received.

It sounds good, but often still might be wrong. "That situation" includes details that still might not be clear. It's hard to communicate an entire frame of mind, and you might find that you'd in fact do something very different if you were confronted with it.

Telling someone what you'd do in that situation is also another way of sussing out context they haven't told you yet. As an extremely simplified example:

"I'd probably remove that piece right there first. It doesn't appear to fit with the rest."

"That piece is holding together this whole subsystem, I'm not going to remove it."

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#206

Post by smeej »

graybeardhacker wrote: post #142
crngefest wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone tells me what to do I instinctively do the exact opposite or at least have the overwhelming urge to

Don't go read about Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

I really don't like that this worked on me even though I'm not the person you were replying to.

But thanks too.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#207

Post by dakiol »

Jensson wrote: post #169
dakiol wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise smart people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking and heuristics? I was one of those. I know the answer: I wasn't/I'm not that intelligent. I learnt that being technically right is not as important as I thought (and I also learnt to care less about it specially when I'm surrounded by other techni…

> I learnt that being technically right is not as important as I thought Only in discussions, whenever you do anything being right is the most important thing as doing the wrong thing is just contra productive, being right saves a massive amount of time and work.

I think there’s a difference between being right and being technically right (I wrote about the latter). For example, being technically right could mean not to lend money to your best friend because you have historical proof that the money will be lost and you won’t get paid back. Being right in this scenario means: give that money to your best pal because that’s what best friend are for. I could be getting this wrong, though (bear with me).

I don’t want to be technically right 100% of the time (it’s hard for me because of my background, I tend to think in analytical terms first, and in humane terms second). Obviously this doesn’t apply to every scenario, but I think the audience gets the idea: there are people out there (me in the past) that go 100% of the time the “technically right” way, no matter what and you cannot convince them of doing the opposite because they can prove it to you that they are “right”

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#208

Post by xeromal »

slim wrote: post #198
efitz wrote: post #183

Hard lessons I've learned: 1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome. 2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a se…

[flagged]

Where is that implied other than the wife not being interested in learning a specific domain.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#209

Post by smeej »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #163
lazide wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A step back - I’d consider the possibility too that it’s a learned behavior where they have received enough pain in the past doing what they were told, so literally have been conditioned to do the opposite of what they were told. And/or, never got attention or positive feedback when doing what they were told - but got lots of attention when they did what they were told not to do. Not necessarily positive, but somethi…

As someone who has some of the traits this is absolutely it. When you spend your childhood being told by people to do things that will lead to, well, almost certainly being poor and having a shit life, you learn to just ignore advice and do the opposite. It is really hard to unlearn this in adulthood. I tend to get by by judging the person giving the advice e.g. if they seem successful then they are more likely to be…

I developed something like this, but it manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."

I feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of taking anybody's word for anything, but it's vastly worse for anyone who reacts with hostility to my questions about points that don't make sense to me.

It was very much trained into me by my father that following the advice of those people leads to suffering and pain. He acted like he knew everything. He reacted with rage when questioned. And looking back on it, he was (and remains) wrong about every single point of substance I ever remember his having made.

Re: Why doesn't advice work?

#210

Post by buttercraft »

crngefest wrote: post #137
ryanmcbride wrote: post #98

The rules I have for myself when giving advice are: 1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism. 2. LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY. 3. Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you would do in that situation. 4. Remember that the purpose of giving advice is just to illuminate options, not to have someone follow what you recommend to the letter. 5. As the advice giver understand that you could b…

If someone tells me what to do I instinctively do the exact opposite or at least have the overwhelming urge to

The worst is when I decide for myself to do something, and then someone suggests the same course of action right as I'm about to do it. Well, now I don't want to.
Post reply on HN